Lead Nurturing Toolkit

Chief Marketing Technology Blog just released their Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. With a near 2,000 vendors, a number that has almost doubled from last year, how does the everyday marketer expect to navigate through the ever-growing sea of tools? Cue the lead nurturing toolkit.

An effective lead nurturing toolkit enables you to mold and witness prospects becoming leads and leads becoming customers. Since leads and customers are constantly providing signals about where they are in the sales cycle, it is important to know where the data is, how to find it, and how to use it– and a lead nurturing toolkit can help.

How I developed the lead nurturing toolkit?

The list below is the outcome of a few, simple–but important–questions.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are often the “source of truth” for your customer data. CRM systems store demographic information, including addresses, contact details, and industry profiles, and engagement data including historical sales and marketing interactions. CRMs and marketing automation systems typically go hand-in-hand. Companies use marketing automation software to nurture relationships with leads and provide helpful buyer’s content. Marketing automation software also assigns leads to the sales team once they indicate that they are ready to engage a live person. But while there is some overlap in where and how customer data is captured and used, the purposes of CRM and marketing automation are quite different– even as we continue to see sales and marketing align. The winner in this category is Salesforce. The CRM giant is used by 35% to 40% of small to midsized CRM-using businesses — which is one reason why we chose to integrate with them. Salesforce also integrates with every other application listed in this post.

Lead scoring helps sales reps focus on the leads with the highest probability of turning into closing opportunities. Predictive lead scoring solutions like Infer are more advanced than traditional lead scoring functionality that is built-in to most marketing automation systems. While traditional lead scoring is basically a rules engine that marketing and sales teams can tweak to score their leads, Infer incorporates big data signals to systematically rank leads based on their historical likelihood to convert. Why do I like Infer? Infer is elegantly solving the difficult problem of helping companies automatically qualify and rank their leads’ quality. Most of the successful SaaS and tech companies, including New Relic, Optimizely, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, and even Hubspot (which has its own lead scoring utility), are using Infer, so clearly they are on to something. Plus, Infer keeps their app incredibly simple, has ever-evolving algorithms, and integrates natively with Salesforce.

One way to turn heads with your lead nurturing efforts is to personalize your communications based the customer’s past behaviors. Event data applications allow an app to capture customer usage data from any device or platform, and share that with other apps in a language they can understand.

You need prospects before you can start lead nurturing. Without being able to first capture user data, all other lead nurturing apps are useless. The goal of a landing page is to capture the end-user’s interest of a specific offer and use the information to nurture them. Instapage makes building and A/B testing landing pages simple. I found Instapage to be the easiest to make our own through painless customization.

Lead intelligence services like InsideView enhance the customer record by adding info from public and proprietary databases. For instance, when you ask for a name and email address on a form, a lead intelligence service could search for the street address of the company that corresponds with the domain name in the email address. You could use this address to send a postcard or “thank you” gift basket. My top pick for a lead intelligence service is InsideView for Marketing. InsideView for Marketing provides contact info for your leads and contacts by searching its proprietary database of millions of people working in small to mid-size businesses and Enterprises. This results in better response rates, more leads, and higher win rates.

Marketers are constantly looking for creative new ways to nurture customers and interact beyond email. One example is to automatically engage customers through personalized text messages (SMS). My choice here is Twilio. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs. Twilio also integrates with Salesforce and other CRM’s.